The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  Jerry and the twins laughed at me for saying this. But they did not know what I knew. Clover said that Father was kind and not to be feared. He could have made a fortune as an inventor, Jerry said.

  “Why don’t he get rich?” Alice said.

  “Because he wanted to come here,” I said, “to build a town in the jungle. More than a town.”

  This did not convince the Maywit children, and when I told them that Father had said there was a war coming in the United States they just laughed. This made me lose heart and talk hollowly, for why else would anyone ditch the United States to sweat his guts out in the jungle? And I knew more than that. I had seen the inside of Fat Boy. That glimpse came back to me, and now, whenever I thought of Father, I saw the hanging tanks, the wilderness of crooked iron, the tubes like a brain in a sleeve, and all the tiny hinges. It had been like seeing the inside of someone’s house, and, by studying it, knowing them better. I knew a person best from something he had made, and in Fat Boy I had seen Father’s mind, a version of it—its riddle and slant and its hugeness—and it had scared me.

  It was because of this, talking about Father in these whispers, that we skipped the baptism altogether and went and collected crazy ants instead. We floated them on the pool and watched them struggle on the skin of the water’s surface.

  Returning from the Acre that day, we saw Little Haddy at the mooring. Some men were carrying tall bottles of gas up the path to Fat Boy, and others were rolling steel drums along logs that served as rails.

  Peewee let out a yell when she saw Father. He was outside Fat Boy, working a hand pump, emptying one of the drums into a pipe. What frightened Peewee was his mask. It was a gas mask, for safety, but it gave him a snout and huge bug eyes. A skull and bones was stenciled on the drum.

  “He always wears that when he’s working with poison,” I said.

  This word poison had a worse effect on the Maywit kids than the weevil mask, and they ran straight into their house with their fingers in their mouths.

  It had taken ten days for Father to get the ammonia and hydrogen from Trujillo to Jeronimo. Mother told us the story of his adventures. Threats in the town. Nosy people. Honduran soldiers accusing him of smuggling explosives. Arguments and almost a fistfight. “How many pushups can you do?” Trouble with vultures. A hard time on the river, which was too shallow in places. Scraping the boat bottom and being followed by unfriendly Zambus and more vultures. A slow and dangerous trip. Into Jeronimo with their keel dragging on the riverbed.

  There were only four gas masks—Father, Haddy, Harkins, and F. Lungley. Because of the danger of fumes, we were not allowed near Fat Boy until the transfer of ammonia and hydrogen was made and the pipes sealed. Father worked all night without lamps or firelight. The full moon gave the clearing a milky-pink shine, like mother-of-pearl, and Fat Boy looked like a block of dark marble, a monument or tomb in the jungle.

  The four masked men jumbled in and out of Fat Boy, and all we heard was the clanging of steel drums and gas bottles, and Father saying “Watch it!” and “Careful!” and “Move over!” and the howler monkeys they called baboons, their googn!

  In the morning, Father was highly excited. If anything had gone wrong, he said, we would have been blown sky-high along with half the valley—probably ended up in Hatfield, in smithereens.

  “I have just spent the most dangerous twelve hours of my whole life,” he said.

  “Sounds to me as if it was dangerous for us too,” Mother said.

  “Sure, but you weren’t aware of the danger, so you could sleep in blissful ignorance.”

  Mother said “I like that,” and turned her back on him.

  “I am the only person here who knows how lethal that stuff is. I took full responsibility. Was I scared? No, ma’am.”

  “We might have been killed!”

  “You wouldn’t have known what hit you. I can give you my cast-iron guarantee of that. You’d have been atomized, with a smile on your face.”

  Mother said, “Thanks, pal.”

  “Don’t worry. All the seals are on. In fact, this afternoon I’m going to fire him up.” Father saw me listening in the doorway. “Quit grinning and spread the news, Charlie. I want everyone over there to watch.”

  ***

  “This is why I’m here,” Father said, after lunch. “This is why I came.”

  He was standing in front of Fat Boy’s firebox with a handful of matches. Mr. Haddy was next to him, and the Maywits nearby with their gray-faced kids. Clover and April sat on the ground with the Zambus, Harkins and Peaselee on kegs, Mrs. Kennywick in the armchair she had dragged over from Swampmouth. There were some other strangers watching from beyond the beanfields.

  “I’ll bet you still don’t know what this is for,” Father said.

  “Cooking,” Mr. Haddy said, and put out his teeth.

  “No guesses,” Father said. “You saw Lungley and Dixon put those trays of water on the shelf inside this monster. Now we’re going to light a little fire here with this weeny match.”

  “Steam engine. Boiler work.” Mr. Haddy clowned for the nervous people.

  “Can it! But stick around. You won’t believe your eyes.”

  He called Peewee over and said that as she was the youngest it was she who should light the first fire. “When we’re all dead and gone, you’ll still be around, Peewee. You can tell your grandchildren that you were here on this historic day. Tell them you lit the fire.”

  Father struck a match on the seat of his pants and showed her where to hold it. There was some kindling in the firebox. Peewee put the match to it and up it went.

  The Zambus grasped their ears. Ma Kennywick blew out her cheeks, and Mr. Maywit said, “Never mind.” No sound came for several minutes, only the fire pop. The birds and bugs of Jeronimo went silent. The people held their breaths and went shiny-faced with waiting.

  A single gloop dropped inside Fat Boy, as of liquid plunging in a pipe’s plump bubble, and we moved, turning from the fire to where the sound had glooped in Fat Boy’s midsection. Now we could all hear each other breathe.

  Mr. Haddy licked his teeth. “Shoo!”

  “Wait for it,” Father said.

  More plungings, and the trembling of pipes, and the creak of swelling tanks—it was a sense, announced in muffled percolations, of loosening in Fat Boy’s belly. It was not one clear sound, but rather a vibration in the plant and all around it. The ground hummed beneath our feet. Liquid was shifting, still rising, and there was a final surge that slowed the vibrations, and the whole plant seemed to stir. The surrounding jungle murmured to the same beat, which was like the throb of a vein in your head in the progress of an almighty bowel movement.

  Mr. Maywit said, “They is queerness coming out from the chimbly.”

  “Smoke,” Father said.

  “He stop bellyaching,” Drainy whispered.

  Father said, “This is going to take a little while. Everyone get comfy. Sit down where you are and let your mind wander. But don’t think about war or madness.”

  “They is just what I think about,” Ma Kennywick said.

  Mrs. Maywit put her chicken eyes on Father and said, “Kin we pray?”

  “If you feel the need, go right ahead. But I honestly wish you wouldn’t, because then you’ll treat this as a miracle—which it isn’t. Rather than as a magnified piece of thermodynamics—which it is.”

  But I could tell from their faces and postures that they were all praying. They sat compactly, with their necks drawn in, like birds in the rain.

  From time to time, Father stoked the fire. But there was not much fueling to be done—it was a small fire, and after it started its whistles and sucks, he kept it damped down.

  “This is where it’s all happening,” Father said. “This is the center of the world! You don’t have to go anywhere—you’re where it’s at!”

  A half-hour passed in this way. Then Father stopped talking and climbed the stepladder. He read the thermometer that stuck out, and he looked
pretty satisfied. Fifteen more minutes, he said, and after that time had gone he mounted the ladder again and crawled into the hatchway.

  “Hope we ain’t have to drag him out by his stumps,” Mr. Haddy said.

  Some people hissed, and Mr. Haddy and others looked at Mother.

  She said, “Allie knows what he’s doing—and here he comes.”

  Father’s head was in the hatchway. He made a face—hard to tell what kind, he was so far up. He waved his hand. He was holding a white ball, like a lump of raw cotton.

  “What Fadder got there?”

  Father was shouting.

  “Haven’t you people ever seen a snowball?”

  He threw it, and it mashed in the grass, whiter than a heron’s feathers.

  We ran to touch it—and as we touched it, feeling the sting of its crystals, it began to vanish. But by then, in triumph, Father was bringing out the cakes of ice.

  15

  ON THIS PART of the river, narrower and shallower than anything I had seen—twenty miles of it, before mountains and jungle twisted it into a trickle—people dropped to their knees on the banks and waved at us and prayed. By now, they knew who we were and what we carried. The news of Fat Boy had spread throughout the river valley.

  “Anyone want a beverage?” Father called to those people on the bank who took us for missionaries. Mr. Haddy thought this question was very funny, and he wheezed whenever Father said it. So later on, even at the uninhabited parts of the river, Father caught Mr. Haddy’s eye and yelled, “Anyone here require a beverage?” and made the man laugh.

  But the kneeling and respectfulness at last made Father gloomy. “The idiots think we came all this way to honk Bibles at them!”

  Five of us were on the boat—besides Father, Mr. Haddy, and me, there was Clover and Francis Lungley. It was not the Little Haddy. Our new boat, built in the weeks after Fat Boy began producing ice, was an adaptation of a pipanto dugout, needle-nosed, wide-bellied, and almost flat-bottomed. It was powered by a pedal mechanism that worked a stern wheel, something like the Swan boats in the Boston Public Garden. Because of its shape and its cargo, Father named the boat the Icicle.

  Except for the pedals and the sprockets and part of the chain (they were from Mr. Harkins’s bike—“I cannibalized his Raleigh!” Father said), the driving mechanism of the Icicle had been made in the forge at Jeronimo, and some small parts by the wire-nibbling teeth of Drainy Maywit. “That kid’s a human micrometer!” Amidships, Father had outrigged an ice-storage vault. There were two seats forward, and two side by side in the stem, in front of the pedaler’s cockpit, which Father called “the Wishing Well—because whoever’s pedaling in it wishes he was somewhere else.” Going upstream, Francis worked the pedals. It was the perfect boat for the upper river. Father claimed that it was so buoyant he could go cross-country in it, providing there was a smidgen of dew on the grass.

  Mr. Haddy said, “These people never see no lanch like this one.”

  “You’re joking,” Father said. “They’ve seen everything. River travel is easy. This is a turnpike. Missionaries have been tooling up and down here in canoes for years. Frankly, I don’t regard this as much of an accomplishment.”

  “Tell you one thing,” Mr. Haddy said—he was shouting from the bow where he sat behind Clover—“they ain’t have no ice with them!”

  “That’s a matter of conjecture—”

  Francis Lungley screamed at the word.

  “—but they were here.”

  Mr. Haddy shrugged. He was wearing one of the La Rosa flour sacks Mother had made into shirts. His back said, Enriquecida con Vitaminas.

  “I want to penetrate where they’ve never been,” Father said.

  There were blue butterflies kiting to the ferny branches that overhung the river, startled by our noise. The tumble and splash of our foot-operated wheel sounded like a washing machine sudsing clothes. I could recognize some of the birds in the trees—the jays and the ivory-billed woodpecker, the cockatoos and crascos—and I knew the cries of the hidden ones—the sudden honk of the smaller pava, the shouts of the forest quail, and the bass-fiddle boom of the curassow. These same birds lived near our camp at the Acre, still our secret hiding place from Father and his work, and his speechy ambitions.

  “I want to take a load of ice to the hottest, darkest, nastiest corner of Honduras, where they pray for water and never see ice, and have never heard of cans, much less aerosol cans.”

  “But Seville like that,” Francis Lungley said, bobbing his head as he pedaled. He was wearing a La Rosa shirt too. His said, Molino Harinero and 45.36 Kgs Netos. “For true, Seville is dirt.”

  He had been promising Seville ever since Father demanded the poorest place imaginable. This had started one of the first arguments in Jeronimo. Mr. Haddy, Mr. Harkins, and Mr. Peaselee wanted to take the ice downstream to Santa Rosa or Trujillo. Father asked, what was the point of that? Big ships called at those ports—those towns had more electricity than was good for them.

  “You just want to impress your friends. No, we’re going upstream.”

  That was when Francis Lungley said that he had once been to Seville, as far upriver as it was possible to go. Mr. Haddy and the others said they were not going to a stewy bat-shoo place where people had no respect and probably had tails. But Father was interested. Francis said he had almost died there twice—first from fright, next from hunger. It was a falling-down village, where the people ate dirt and looked like monkeys—anyway, ugly as monkeys. They had rat hair and most were naked. They were not even Christians.

  “That sounds like my kind of place,” Father said.

  Then Mr. Haddy agreed and said, oh, yes, heathens were the best fishermen and the strongest paddlers and “Those boys knows how to work, for true.”

  But as we sudsed up the river (monkeys on the right, kinkajous on the left), Father said, “I find it hard to believe that some missionary hasn’t been here before and bought their souls with Twinkies and cheese spread in spray cans and crates of Rice-a-Roni.” He watched a monkey on a branch. “Hershey bars.” We passed by. He looked back at the monkey. “Diet Pepsi.” Now he turned to the kinkajous. “Kool-Aid.” He flicked his cigar butt into the river. “Makes your mouth water, doesn’t it?”

  “You see Seville, Fadder,” Francis said, pedaling harder, his La Rosa shirt black with sweat.

  “I want to see a wreck of a village that hasn’t got a name, where they’ve been swatting mosquitoes and eating rancid wabool for two thousand years.” Father pointed to the mountains. “Over those baffles, where it’s all hell and they’re being roasted alive!”

  “Too bad we ain’t back of Brewer’s Lagoon,” Mr. Haddy said. “Some of them villages is rubbish.”

  We had started before dawn—so early, the nighttime mosquitoes were still out and biting us. But by noon, though we had gone miles, we were some distance from the mountains of Olancho that marked the end of the river, where Seville was. We tied up at a riverbank for lunch. It was so thickly overgrown we could not get off the boat. The bank was hidden under bush fans and yards of lianas. Mother had packed us a basket of fruit and cassava bread and fresh tomatoes and a Jeronimo drink that Father called Jungle Juice, made from guavas and mangoes. Clover said the juice wasn’t cold enough.

  “It’s plenty cold enough,” Father said. “Listen, no one’s touching that ice!”

  He checked the vault on the boat to make sure the ice was still holding up. The ice was wrapped in banana leaves and the vault lined with rubber we had tapped from the hoolie trees. He had not made us galoshes after all.

  “You’re bound to lose a little,” he said. The ice had shrunk in its banana-leaf wrappings. “Seepage. Natural wastage. Friction”—he was plumping it with his hands—“owing to excessive agitation. Right, Francis?”

  Francis Lungley was peeling a banana. He did it delicately with his fingertips, like opening a present.

  “I mean, how are we doing?”

  The village of Seville was som
e way off, Francis said. He could not say exactly how far. He squinched his face when Father asked him the miles.

  “How many men paddling the cayuka when you were here before?”

  “No cayuka,” Francis said. “Just foots.” He showed us his cracked feet. His ankles were oily from pedaling the boat.

  Father blew up. “Now he tells us! He walked! For all we know, we might not get there until tomorrow.” He yanked the stern painter from the branch and said the lunch break was over. “If you want to stay here, you can,” he said to me. “But we’re not going to hang around and watch you feed your face.”

  I stuffed the sandwich I had made into my pocket, and we cast off. Soon, with Father’s barking, we sudsed along like a motorboat.

  “What are you brooding about?”

  I said, “I wanted to pick one of those avocados back there.”

  “You’re seeing things,” Father said. “There aren’t any avocados around here.”

  But there were—small, wild avocados. We had eaten them at the Acre. Alice Maywit had identified them. The Zambu John had told her about them. We peeled them and mashed them with salt and planted the seeds. I looked at Francis, but his eyes were turned on Father.

  “Ain’t real butter pears,” Francis said. “Just bush kind.”

  “If I’ve got so many authorities on board, how come we’re making such slow progress?”

  No river is straight. They only turn and go crosswise and sometimes lead you backward—the nose of your boat heading into the direction you just left. River travel is like forever being turned back and not getting there. The sun shifts sideways from the bow to starboard, where it sways until a riverbend brings it over to port. Soon it slips astern. You know you’ve been going forward, but the sun isn’t in your face any longer—it is heating the back of your head. Some minutes later it is beating on your knuckles. Then it is back to starboard. Another reach and it is burning around the boat, useless to navigate by. All it tells you is how much time has passed. For coastal sailing, the sun is a good guide, but it was confusing here.